Chapter 1 — Antonio Blake, Hmm…

“There is no perfection, only beautiful versions of brokenness.” 

—Shannon L. Alder

Three days. For three days, she’d had very little sleep or food to eat but enough coffee to replace her blood with it. The three most awful days of her life, she thought. Until now.

As soon as she’d laid eyes on Antonio Blake, she knew.

Karina’s eyes now glared through the lenses of her goggles at the path ahead. She hoped her assistant, Parker, had gotten the information right. According to her watch, she’d only been walking for less than an hour. The heavy boots, snow, and the fifteen layers of clothing she was wearing made the ordeal feel longer.

For the life of me, he couldn’t run off to the beach like a normal person? Karina thought as she soldiered through the thick, snowy ground, keeping her eyes on the gray stone structure ahead. Maybe it was the thin air and exhaustion, but she could see the teeniest flicker of light there. Antonio had to be there, or she would start slashing random people at the throat.

God knew she wasn’t a monster.

Nothing good ever came from working with Antonio Blake, she’d been warned. Her mentor, the award-winning director Ellis Stacker, had warned her. Her father, the man who knew nothing about film and its actors, had warned her. Her godmother Imani, Imani’s daughter, and her best friend Neena. Even Anthony, Antonio’s brother and agent, tried to talk her out of it. But Karina didn’t acquire her reputation by doing as she was told. The more a task was impossible—the more it shouldn’t be done, really—the more it became irresistible to her. Her cat, Queenie, had even tried to stall her on her way to that first meeting by getting sick on the tablet where the script was stored. When that didn’t work, she thought to trip her.

All her life, when people weren’t telling her no, they were trying to put her down. She had always been tall and broad, with thick, curly hair, a big nose, thick lips, and a wide mouth. Her childhood was a thesaurus of awful and insulting names. She cried herself to sleep clutching her favorite stuffed animal, Cas, imagining that he protected her from the mean ones. Little did she realize that a miserable childhood would give her a steely spine later in life.

Film school was bad, and the industry was a jungle filled with the wildest and most ravenous of beasts. If she wasn’t treated with condescension because of her gender, she was sexually harassed. There were some actors, and even producers, who refused to work with a black woman, and she was an ugly woman. What was to be gained by working with her? They would sneer. Nothing to sweeten the deal. 

Karina persevered. She joined contests where her work in short films got lauded, helping her build a steady and solid resume. By the time she won the jury prize in the Carlton Young Film Makers competition, in the short film category, she was already quite known. It helped her get more jobs, although in independent productions. She said yes to all. Again, she made her rounds in the indie film circuit, sprinkling her short films here and there as she gradually acquired the stamina, grit, talent, and balls to shoot a full-length film. Her efforts paid off. The Final Breath was in everyone’s lists of Best Films the year it was shown. She followed it up with another independent feature, Tastebuds, which got critical acclaim and a bigger financial return. Now mainstream film actors and producers wanted to work with her. She still had to remind people to look past her little breasts, but she didn’t have to do it so much these days. But the battle for equality for women filmmakers was far from over, and she intended to contribute to the cause.

Sure enough, when mainstream producers and actors started courting her, the offers were for romantic comedies and dramas. Karina had no problem with those—romantic comedies were a guilty pleasure of hers—but they were the genres almost exclusively offered to women. It wasn’t that she wanted to direct an epic war film someday—although she would, if the story was good—but she wanted something gritty and dark. Something muddy.

Definitely not snow.

Karina groaned and cursed as she kicked at the snow, never tearing her eyes away from the building that was getting bigger the closer she approached. An early blizzard had made flying impossible, so the pilot—some asshole named Edwin who’d seemed to be able to see through the entire closet’s worth of clothes she was wearing at the moment—dropped her off five miles away and helped her rent a snowmobile. He even offered to take her there on it, but Karina refused. She had a GPS, and there was no way she was going to put her arms around or touch the leering pilot. No way!

Her bravado and relief at being away from that perv were short lived though. About three miles out, the snowmobile stalled and no amount of kicking and yelling at the blasted thing could make it work. She could've called Edwin, but the GPS indicated there was only a short distance left. She jogged seven miles four times a week. She could walk two miles easy.

She must’ve done something bad to be freezing her ass off in this dreary, snow-choked island. Her teeth were chattering so loudly she feared that one more puff of air would knock them out completely. She couldn’t feel her face.

“Damn you, Antonio Blake.”

What made her current situation even more hateful was she had tried to introduce steps to avoid it. She’d offered him a body double! They could shoot the scene so it showed some random guy’s nude body then cut to his face. But no. Antonio Blake had looked at her like he wanted to slap her as he declared that he was doing the full-frontal scene. Full frontal with lots of continuous, lingering shots on his face, ass, dick, and missing arm.

She had admired him at that point. Disabled actors were few and far between, and when actors played them, it was the magic of cinema and technology that removed their legs or arms. But Antonio Blake didn’t always have one arm. A terrible car accident had crushed his right arm and sent him into self-exile for years. When word got around that he was shopping for a role, including one in the Runner script, Karina knew she had to fight to be its director and for him to play the title role. The story had the grittiness and muddiness she was looking for. Antonio Blake, with or without the severed limb, was the only actor in her mind for Runner.

So much for that. Continuous lingering shots on the shoulder, indeed. If it were up to Karina, she would shoot the scene with a body double and then Antonio’s face later. But the producers were paying him serious money precisely for the full frontal. With production stalled because Antonio suddenly got cold feet and lost his balls, Karina was pressured on all sides to haul his ass back into the studio or she was finished. She’d had no choice.

All those years of suffering, harassment, hard work, and tears. The relationships she could have had (not that there were many). Experiences. Another life. All would be for nothing because some diva actor had heartlessly changed his mind and thought to kill her dreams as a bonus.

By the time Karina swept past several low-hanging branches a few feet away from the modern gray stone and wood structure, she was panting and her sweat had frozen. Her eyes narrowed at the pillar of white smoke exiting the chimney. She was a nice person. She really was. But knowing that Antonio was cozied up next to a warm fire with hot chocolate while she was slogging through the snow and losing feeling limb by limb was bringing a fresh surge to her irritation. She hauled herself to the front door and rammed her gloved fist repeatedly against it.

“Antonio Blake!” she yelled. “Open the door!”

She kicked the door.

“Karina?” She heard Antonio say from inside. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Open the door.”

“Alright, alright. God, how’d you find me?”

“I can’t give an answer if my tongue freezes and falls off, now can I?”

“A tragedy,” he drawled.

Karina raised her fist to knock again when the door opened.

There he was. Antonio Blake. With his perfect hair, black-brown eyes, and face that could launch at least a thousand ships. His dark skin was flushed and warm. Everything about him was everything a sane, flesh-and-blood woman wanted in the middle of this snowy hell. A face lovingly carved by the gods and no doubt blessed with kisses. All in a cozy gray sweater. A really cozy gray sweater that you wanted to nuzzle and purr against.

Then he smiled.

Damn those teeth that the orthodontist promised but never delivered. Damn those huge dimples!

A sane, flesh-and-blood woman would want him alright. Even in his sweater and jeans, Antonio Blake looked good enough to rival the delicious indulgence of a hot chocolate crammed with marshmallows.

Karina was a woman; she was flesh and blood.

But she was past sanity.

She answered his smile with a scowl and flew towards him, hands out to wring him by the neck.